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LSE Cities is an international centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science that carries out research, education and outreach activities in London and abroad. Its mission is to study how people and cities interact in a rapidly urbanising world, focussing on how the design of cities impacts on society, culture and the environment. Through research, conferences, teaching and projects, the centre aims to shape new thinking and practice on how to make cities fairer and more sustainable for the next generation of urban dwellers, who will make up some 70 per cent of the global population by 2050.

Macro forces continue to have an impact on the global influence of cities. Political power is rotating back from West to East, and with economic drivers having shifted from agrarian to industrial to information-based, more people live in cities than in rural areas. While New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo still rank among today's top cities, it appears that Beijing and Shanghai may become significant rivals in the next 10 to 20 years. These are among the highlights of the 2012 Global Cities Index (GCI), a joint study performed by A.T. Kearney and The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. In addition, a panel of academic and corporate executive advisors informed and challenged the study results. We've expanded this year's study; in addition to classifying the current global influence of 66 cities, we have also developed an Emerging Cities Outlook (ECO) to project which emerging-market cities may eventually rival the established global leaders for dominance. Figure 1 summarizes the 2012 results, along with the rankings from our 2008 and 2010 findings of major world metropolitan areas. (The censorship metric added in 2010 affected the positions of several emerging-market cities.) In the first section of this report, we explore the results and implications of the 2012 GCI rankings. The second section summarizes the results of our Emerging Cities Outlook, which analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of cities in developing markets by examining the rates of change and key factors that will affect their ability to capitalize on future globalization trends (see Appendix: About the Study).